Is Nighthold too easy on melee dps?

[Deleted]

I've done the ranged bs and I hate every single moment of it. I like fast paced fun; it's more relaxing to me. I hate having to stand there and cast. That to me just isn't fun so even when melee got shit on because they were "inferior" to ranged, I still chose what I enjoy playing. It's got nothing to do with maturity. I'm a 36 year old mother of 2 in a guild that has more (grown) women in it than I have ever been part of in the past and yes there are some that are the stereotypical healers but most of them are melee or tanks. I firmly believe people need to play what they feel comfortable with not what's FOTM or playing something they hate just to avoid labeling commentaries like the above mentioned. And no I don't hurr durr on bosses. As a WW monk I am flying all over the room to get cake and jumping in to scrubbers to save the team. I'm jumping out to help those in chains on Gul'dan and chasing after eyes. Regardless of your role, everyone SHOULD be doing things like that to help out the team as a whole not just there to stroke their epeens on warcraft logs.

Sorry if I offended you mate

When I said "in general" I don't mean every last single person. It just means that 7 out of 10 melees are bad, but only 5 out of 10 range players are bad. If you get what I mean. There are still 3 melees that are good. Maybe you are one of them !

[apeiron1234]

It has been diaper mode for melee since WOD. Christ in Nighthold the only thing melee need to look out for is a fucking bridge collapsing and they still manage to fuck that one up.

[Holofernes]

i wouldl really like to be in a raid where i "tunnel the boss" as melee. but realistically, i am running around like a madman chasing eyes at 15 % hp, or some piece of cake because that stupid owl just ate one which was in range of melee, and i have to cross the whole room for the one he was meant to eat, i have to charge / stun flowers, leap around to orbs, whereas a ranged just stands there and goes bam bam bam bam with an occasional sidestep. Our warlocks deal 900 k dps on those fights, while i deal half of it, becuase i run around chasing stuff. On fights that are pure singletarget we are even, but jesus ranges benefit soooo much from more spread out mobs everywhere type of encounters. i bet that nearly every melee runs more metres in a boss encounter than ranges do, they dont have to run to switch their target.

And for example a shadowpriest: he does dmg while he is running, because he has dots on everything. he even can recast them while running. a melee does ZERO dmg while running. nada zero nothing.

But the biggest advantage ranges have: they actually see whats happening, they see projectiles flying around. as melee all you see is visual clutter and u stare at your feet to make sure u are not standing in bad stuff. Playing ele / resto in mythic is way more relaxed than playing warrior in heroic.

[stevenho]

I play both Mage and a DH in mythic nighthold. Most fights are unbelievably skewed - botanist on mage and botanist on DH are two completely different fights, where DH gets to sit on boss 24/7 turning it into a patchwerk with movement, but DH doesn't give 2 shits about movement.
This is a common theme for most bosses I've done so far. I tend not to give a shit about any mechanics unless it is stuff like a cake near melee on trillax. Otherwise ranged plebs handles everything. Which is pretty infuriating when playing my mage, which is my main.

[ro9ue]

yeah and that is a good thing. Atleast for progress and peace of mind.

In general melee players are, in terms of maturity, patience and skill, inferior to their range counterparts.

It is a bit on the extreme side in LEGION and especially Nighthold that ranges have to do all the work while melees are tunneling the boss, but that is only logical considering how easy it is to perform well as a melee, to churn out good dps compared to range players.

Some bosses are a bit too much like Gul'Dan, mythic trilliax and a few others where it basically comes down to : "melee players you can hurr durr the boss while the range players master all the mechanics and make sure we don't wipe on the boss".
Sadly on some bosses like Botanist it happens too often that melee players are getting hit by the lashers while they are drooling on their keyboard, but thankfully Blizzard realized that with LEGION and the introduction of a new melee class, the Demon Hunter, that a very big majority of the "noobs" are ultimately drawn to that new shiny immature "I am so cool I am illidan" class that they made sure the biggest parts of the difficulties that raiding holds are best left for the range players.

Overall I think Blizzard did a good job. Sure it is annoying as a range player to carry those guys, but I would rather have it the way it currently is compared to a world where we need to rely on melees playing properly.
I for one am happy that Blizzard, and also raidleaders, are letting the melees do what they do best. Tunneling the boss and delight themselves over the damage meters where they always take the top spots for reasons beyond their comprehensive abilities.

As a melee player, I'm self aware enough to acknowledge this as truth. I tried casters (excluding hunters from the ranged category) and the fact that you have to stop cast so often and deal with a ton of mechanics where you need to move around... yeah. That shit is hard and it ain't for me.

There used to be a balance where the ranged would benefit when the boss moved a lot it wasn't a dps loss for them, where as melee had to constantly keep uptime on the boss. That changed when Blizzard decided casters had too much "casting on the go" mechanics. RIP Lightning bolt, Incinerate, etc while moving. And also there seem to be a ton of debuffs going out in raids where you need to run away... it's like the core ranged DPS mechanic in raiding now.

[GreenJesus]

LUL at all the ranged giving each other a circle jerk. I am a holy/Ret. As ret have 3 second steed on a 45 second cool down. If I go run over somewhere I am left with waddling all the way back w/ 0 DPS. For example, tich if I go and kill adds away from tichondrius I can steed to reach the adds and start DPSing OR I waddle to the adds and then steed back to the boss. Either way there is downtime that a ranged player could have just tab targeted stood in place. In order for group to get maximum DPS for enrage timer it is more effective sometimes to just have some slower melter sit on boss.

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

I remember most raids had 1-2 fights that "weren't so bad" on melee.. and most expansions were much harsher on melee too... this expansion seems to have evened the odds a little and here we are acting like the sky is falling.

[Bradders]

As a former mythic-level Fury warr, I can say that Nighthold is a breath of fresh air. While I'm not up to my old levels, I just do norm and a few heroic raid bosses these days, I do remember the particular pain that was every fucking ranged player in my raid except for the one hunter who wasn't a fucktard. Literally, every single fight in all of Mists, there were 3 people doing all of the 'important' mechanics - myself, said good hunter, and our disc priest. All of my ranged DPS just couldn't be fucking asked to turn 180 degrees and burn a freshly spawned mob. It was me leap-charging to the add, colossus smashing and murdering it, intervening back to a ranged, charging back to the boss. Every. Fucking. Time. I still ended up with top-3 dps on nearly every fight, but thats only because, after doing every fight so many times, I had my timings down so well that I lost only a few seconds of non-CS time on critical mobs. I was the 'special teams' guy, I did Tortos shell kicks, I did Ji-kun nests, I did Blackfuse belts, I did every thankless interrupt and quick-murder job because 'hurr durr muh boss damage', and 'hurr durr muh DoTs'. Bitch please.

[Mavick]

or hunters who cant seem to understand if something is dropping 30 yards from the boss and it needs to be soaked they should do it and not force the rogue to pop sprint to run over and do it because the hunter wants to tunnel dps.

That might have more to do with the fact that your soaking CD is half the time of the hunter's, as well as the fact that you can use that and still have other defensive cooldowns to fall back on if necessary. You're not helping the cognitive reasoning part of the argument, at any rate.

[Bloodmagix]

Yes, legion raids are very melee friendly. It's beyond me why raid leaders keep prioritizing ranged > melee...

Can you imagine Frost Bomb with a melee stacked raid? Yeah no thanks..

[itomeshi]

Exactly. And this is where we are all coming back to the initial statements at hand.
Warlocks, a range class through and through, have to strategize before every fight. Knowing every detail about the fight and planning ahead a thousand of iterations and different outcomes to chose the most optimal spot to place the circle and portal to make the most use of it.
More often than now the Portals are actual meant for the raid so they have to get in the minds of other players to think for them aswell.

For example my guild places Portals in a way that melee players have it easier. E.g. Chronomatic Anomaly so that melee players can stay longer on the boss and then jump through the adds. The warlocks even adapt and put new portal the further the fight progress.

I don't know of any melee class that has to go through such lengths before a fight. They just use their gap closer cooldowns whenenver they need them whereever they need them because they are easy to use and bring you where you want to. No planning needed.

And thank you for bringing that up. It was a perfect example of why range players are, in fact, the better players (on average).

Perhaps you should rethink your examples?

Demonic Gateway is a raid utility ability. While your Warlocks should be sharing suggestions - 'What about here to help the X group?' 'I can't reliably place it there.' - the majority of that utility should be up to your raid leaders. That said, most strategies make pretty clear where people will need to move from and to, so there typically isn't 'thousands' of permutations.

However, your mention of Demonic Circle is a bit more telling. You're right, there is no melee with a gap closer like that. Well, except monks, with Trancendence/Trancendence: Transfer. Which is actually slightly trickier to use due to the position swapping and two separate spells. (Now, to be fair, monks do have Roll/Chi Torpedo and Windwalker even gets Flying Dragon Kick. That being said, Roll is shorter - around Blink range (which I can't verify due to the tooltip on Roll being unhelpful) - and Flying Dragon Kick has a unique set of problems. Meanwhile, Warlocks also can get Burning Rush.

By and large, your arguments are hearsay. Your personal observations are too small of a sample size. 30-40 posters in a 'filter-bubble' thread are not a sufficient sample size.


Range and Melee face different challenges:

- Interrupts: Melee have shorter cooldowns and are therefore typically more reliable for primary-target rotational interrupts; ranged interrupts are better for spot fill and distant add interrupts.
- Visibility: Typically, ranged have relatively clear visibility. Melee, however, have a often messy area to work with, especially on larger raid sizes: pets, multiple players, adds, and ground effects make picking out important things - like the edge of a ground effect - tricky.
- Dodging boss abilities: Melee typically have more restrictions on where they can be with respect to the boss. While some bosses do have frontal cones that would affect ranged, this is the exception. Think of Guarm and Flashing Fangs: Melee have an inherent risk; ranged need to check how close they get, but have far more room to work with it.
- AOE movement: Both ranged and melee have to move out of bad areas; the visibility issue compounds this for melee. PBAoE is especially more melee-centric - what for ranged is merely a stop-casting and sidestep is often cooldown management, GCDs lost, and high risk for melee.
- Target switching: Ranged typically has instantaneous target switching. While there may be rotational requirements to get up to full damage, ranged typically can hit a distant target harder and faster.
- Preplanned movement: When boss movement is planned (direction, markers, timers) and reliable, melee have an advantage in that they can DPS during the move more reliably. However, such preplanning does benefit casters, albeit to a lesser degree.
- Specific player movement mechanics: Ranged definitely gets player targeted mechanics more often, and many of these prevent ranged from moving to melee. It's not unheard of for melee - for example, Tichondrius' Carrion Plague/Seeker Swarm targets both. The challenge differs in that melee requires more careful positioning while ranged has to move more.
- Tank positioning issues: Generally, melee is more heavily impacted by issues with tank positioning. Trilliax is an example of this - if a bad tank (like me!) doesn't move quickly enough, melee has a Faustian bargain of not hitting the boss or taking substantial puddle damage. Ranged tends to be less affected by this. Even proper tank movement can badly interrupt a melee rotation due to 'normal' lag - 'oh, I thought that combo point ability hit!'
- Movement abilities: Melee tends to get more numerous and more flexible movement abilities as a solution to their generally greater need for movement. It's important to note that these aren't identical both across classes (sorry DKs) and even within a class. (As an example, someone brought up Warriors on Gul'dan. They mentioned Heroic Leap and Charge, but failed to note the third Warrior movement ability, Intervene - which targets a friendly ally and has a damage transfer component. It's high-risk, high-reward, and skillful usage is both complex and a big separator between classes of warriors. The difference, really, is that it's not 'Heroic vs. Mythic' warriors, it's 'Mythic at all vs. Mythic realm first' warriors.) And remember, for both classes, GCDs spent on movement abilities are GCDs not spent DPSing. (They do have a high DPS value, however, according to the maxim: Dead DPS Do NO Damage.)

TL;DR: Both melee and ranged have strengths and weaknesses; both have good and bad players. Pretending otherwise is folly.

The initial problem here is that generalizing classes of players based on subrole leads to a filter bubble. The bigger problem is that the conversation is not adding value. For any comment to this effect, we need to ask ourselves: Am I getting to the core of why we wiped last attempt? Am I trying to help the bad melee or bad ranged be better players? Am I trying to give an honest recommendation for new players? Am I trying to help shape raid group or generally accepted raid strategy for a fight to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses? If not, what am I doing? Is it worth doing?

[Deleted]

TL;DR: Both melee and ranged have strengths and weaknesses; both have good and bad players. Pretending otherwise is folly.

I agree.

On average ranges are a bit better though. There are still good melees and bad range players in this game though. Completely agree.
For example with have an elemental shaman who is rather old and not completely up to speed and we have a really good Retribution Paladin who really helps out with nice Blessings and lay on hands when needed.
Like I said before. Not all melees are bad, they are just a bit worse on average and that is not so bad considering Nighthold is designed so they are not overstraining melees

[Grof]

When my game time ends, you'll have one ranged less guys

Hey COWboy, do you really think anybody care???!!!...

[Vicivia]

I agree.

On average ranges are a bit better though. There are still good melees and bad range players in this game though. Completely agree.
For example with have an elemental shaman who is rather old and not completely up to speed and we have a really good Retribution Paladin who really helps out with nice Blessings and lay on hands when needed.
Like I said before. Not all melees are bad, they are just a bit worse on average and that is not so bad considering Nighthold is designed so they are not overstraining melees

As someone who has broad experience of both melee and ranged at a high level, it honestly just sounds like you play with bad melee. Any good melee will be handling mechanics and still keeping up numbers. Personally, I have met far more exceptional melee in my day than ranged, though there are also more melee specs. However, the notion that on average ranged are better then melee is just patently false. Tons of people play both ranged and melee, and are terrible at both, or exceptional at both, just as there are people that are bad melee and good ranged and vice-versa.

Regardless, it's nice to have a raid that doesn't screw melee over on 80%+ of the bosses and encourage mage/lock stacking for once in literally forever.

[Sageless]

I remember most raids had 1-2 fights that "weren't so bad" on melee.. and most expansions were much harsher on melee too... this expansion seems to have evened the odds a little and here we are acting like the sky is falling.

The last two expansions have been snooze fests for melee. Both WoD and Legion have been extremely easy for melee (as in how to deal with mechanics).
The only reason fights where melee "unfriendly" was that if you brought too many the ranged mechanics started targetting melee (eg 6 ranged are targetted, you only have 5 ranged = 1 melee targetted).
The main difference with the expansions before that was that melee was forced to deal with mechanics like spawning adds, or moving to a different location.
Now often ranged are just expected to deal with these on their own, or things are stacked on the boss so melee can cleave on them. Can you even imagine if we would get an encounter like Algalon where an entire melee team has to move at the same time since the thing spawns under them .

[honung]

The ranged seem to cause more trouble than the melee in my raid group. Our melees rarely cause wipes. For example, most of the time someone got killed by Collapse on Botanist it was a ranged. The trouble with soaking on Krosus was usually in the back because someone didn't run far enough. If someone died to a Beam or ran into a Slam it was usually a ranged.

Melee players get to practice dodging things a lot more, so it makes sense that they'd do it better. Meanwhile ranged generally get to do more stuff on bosses, so they have more chances to mess it up, so they seem to cause a lot more wipes. All makes sense, really. Circle-jerking each other because you play the same role in a raid and claiming that role has something to do with intelligence makes you look incredibly silly.

It's perfectly reasonable that melee get to do a bit more DPS and not get targeted by as many abilities because they are disadvantaged by needing to be in melee range. If you have melee and ranged do the same DPS and have to run around to do things the same amount, there's no reason to bring a melee to a raid, which is something that has happened in the past. Ranged DPS are just better than melee DPS, and that needs to be taken into consideration when designing encounters and balancing DPS.

[Deleted]

I agree.

On average ranges are a bit better though. There are still good melees and bad range players in this game though. Completely agree.
For example with have an elemental shaman who is rather old and not completely up to speed and we have a really good Retribution Paladin who really helps out with nice Blessings and lay on hands when needed.
Like I said before. Not all melees are bad, they are just a bit worse on average and that is not so bad considering Nighthold is designed so they are not overstraining melees

You must be the most condescending and passiv aggressive person on this forum with your BS and and the end of every post to troll even more .

You agree with people and in the next sentence you go 180 on them and insinst on your OPINION to be the TRUTH and FACTS which you backup with generalisations of your own experience.

Please link us your logs so we can gaze upon the glory of your mechanics handling and saving the god damn raid if not the entire game itself ever freaking time.

P.S. nice troll/baiter thread

[Adoxe]

Literally every raid before Legion shat on Melee, it's time for us to stand still for once.

[Deleted]

You must be the most condescending and passiv aggressive person on this forum with your BS and and the end of every post to troll even more .

You agree with people and in the next sentence you go 180 on them and insinst on your OPINION to be the TRUTH and FACTS which you backup with generalisations of your own experience.

Please link us your logs so we can gaze upon the glory of your mechanics handling and saving the god damn raid if not the entire game itself ever freaking time.

P.S. nice troll/baiter thread

nonononono.

Look at the quote. He said :"TL;DR: Both melee and ranged have strengths and weaknesses; both have good and bad players. Pretending otherwise is folly."

And I agree with that.

His statement doesn't say anything about the average skill. Let me simplify it for you with an example :

China has both tall and small men. Netherlands has both tall and small men. But on average the people living in netherlands are taller than those living in China.

Same with melees and ranges. Melees do have good and bad players, ranged do have good and bad players, but on average ranges are better players.

I sincerly do hope you understand it now

[Self Inflicted Wounds]

Same with melees and ranges. Melees do have good and bad players, ranged do have good and bad players, but on average ranges are better players.

Umm, no? ....